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Try a New Spin on Blending Drills for your Intervention Lessons
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Blending drills are a key component to a successful and effective intervention lesson. They help solidify phonics skills and improve fluency and accuracy.
I first learned about this drill when I was being trained as an Orton-Gillingham tutor. It is a Science of Reading approach to teaching reading. Blending drill are usually used as a spiral review of phonics skills learned, including many different vowel teams. I still use the blending drill this way, but I found I saw a lot of gains in my student’s accuracy and fluency when I also practiced using JUST the skill we were focusing on.
For example, if I am teaching the vowel team ay, I will practice words with just vowel team ay in them. This allows students the opportunity grapheme map the words in their brain. Most struggling readers need multiple repetitions.
I usually focus on one skill for about a week. I feel like struggling readers need at least five days with lots and lots of repeated practice to master a skill. Sometimes longer depending on the skill. I give lots of practice of the skill with decodable text, and phonics specific games and activities.
What is a Blending Drill?
Blending drills are traditionally done with phoneme grapheme cards. This is a GREAT approach, however if you are working with multiple groups of students on different phonics skills, keeping the cards organized can be a nightmare! I started making slideshows, and this is way more manageable, but I was having a hard time keeping them organized on computer and was taking away valuable teaching minutes. My solution was to upload them to my YOUTUBE channel.
This has been a game changer for me. Easy to keep everything organized and off my hard drive. I also like them in a video format where I can just push play, and they can read, and it is a GREAT warm up that can be used in a small group or with the whole class! I am happy to share that I have these videos available to you to use in your classroom!
Start using blending drills in your classroom today! I have printable cards, or you can try out the videos on YOUTUBE too. Make sure you like and subscribe to my channel, so you are notified when new videos are uploaded.
How Does a Blending Drill Work in a Lesson?
Blending drills are a way to warm the brain up. I introduce the skill specific blending drill on the second day of the lesson. The first day I use a traditional spiral review drill as a review before introducing the new skill. My intervention lessons make it easy to have what you need for each skill. You can take a peek at them here.
The videos play on their own at a perky pace to encourage fluency. I practice the same video for multiple days in a row to build fluency and accuracy. Sometimes I will have students read a word one at a time other times we will chorally read the word. Here is the vowel team AY blending drill on YOUTUBE.
After warming up we continue with reading and writing words with the skill. Following a structured literacy science of reading lesson plan format. I like to finish up a lesson with a decodable reader, fluency practice or a game. I have all of these for every phonics skill in my store here.
Try these in your classroom today!
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